A whopping 12% of the population aged 13 to 38 consider themselves social influencers, according to marketing company Morning Consult. For those at the very top, it's an incredibly lucrative business where 8-year-olds have been known to make tens of millions of dollars in a single year. But what about those lower down the totem pole or just starting out?

It hasn’t even been a full year since Instagram launched its in-app purchasing feature, allowing us to go from liking an image to buying whatever it is we just liked. If you’ve found yourself buying a little more than your budget can afford, you’re not alone.

Facebook has launched Facebook Pay, a payment system for Facebook and Messenger. It’ll roll out first for “fundraisers, in-game purchases, event tickets, person-to-person payments on Messenger and purchases from select Pages and businesses on Facebook Marketplace,” the company said in its announcement. It plans to then expand it to Instagram and WhatsApp. In theory, you’ll be able to use Facebook Pay for purchases throughout your daily life, not just in Facebook’s ever-expanding ecosystem.

I really like Instagram’s Stories feature. I like to tag businesses I’m at in stories, and friends, and probably spend way too much time during the day looking at what the people I follow are up to (and sharing) on the service. This week Instagram added a few new features to Stories, specifically ones that highlight stories by location or hashtag.

iOS: Instagram just updated with dark mode, so you can stare at people’s brightly coloured holiday photos and ads for horrible coffee tables surrounded by inky black, like you’re developing film in a darkroom. The only way to turn it on is by enabling dark mode across all of iOS.

The battle over your online privacy could get a lot messier very soon.

Tweens and teens used to be able to leave their bullies behind in the school hallways at the end of the day; but now, with the prevalence of social media and smartphones, they carry their bullies with them wherever they go.

Just because you can buy something online, doesn’t mean you should. Trichloroacetic acid, a main ingredient in the kind of chemical peel you would get from an esthetician or a dermatologist, is easy to obtain but it’s not safe to use yourself at high concentrations.

I’ve been doing Instagram all wrong. Hear me out. Whenever I’m killing time, browsing through my friends’ many Instagram stories, I will frequently come across some person or account going absolutely wild with their story posts.

I love Hamilton, I do, and I think their social media game is strong and frequently interesting, but sometimes I just don’t have the patience to tap through 40+ stories to get to the rest of my friends. See the problem? I’ve been tapping.

A few weeks ago I attended a music festival with some friends. At some point, I was scrolling through Instagram Stories and then put my phone in my pocket. When I took it out a little while later I realised that I had apparently sent DMs to a number of my friends with an image of another friend’s plate of oysters.

Earlier this week, Judd Apatow, Debra Messing, and Rick Perry⁠ — the U.S. Secretary of Energy and guy in control of America's nuclear weapons⁠ — fell for a lie that’s been circulating on Instagram: that Instagram changed its policies so that they could use all of your photos, messages, and other information at their disposal.

In reality, Instagram doesn't legally "own" your photos - but it can use them in any way it sees fit, forever.

Now anyone can create their own AR effects for Instagram Stories using Facebook’s Spark AR Studio.

Instagram has been busy updating their app in recent weeks with the latest update promising to disable your account if you repeatedly violate their community guidelines.

Social media 'liking' systems have long been a source of competition and anxiety for users but Instagram, a site that records the most-liked photos, is attempting to ditch 'likes' altogether.

In an interview last week regarding privacy concerns, Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, wants you to know: Your privacy isn’t at stake (for now). “We don’t look at your messages, we don’t listen in on your microphone, doing so would be super problematic for a lot of different reasons,” he told CBS’ Gayle King. “But I recognise you’re not gonna really believe me.”

Fitness Instagram can be a place of powerful inspiration. It can also be a soul-sucking morass full of impossibly fit people doing things you could never dream of and selling products that you suddenly need to have. Here’s how to use it so you feel better, not worse, after checking your feed.

In San Francisco, it started with The Museum of Ice Cream, a 'museum' downtown where for around $55 dollars you can snap selfies of yourself next to a unicorn or submerged in sprinkles in the building’s 'sprinkle pool'.

Last week Instagram added a new feature that allows you to add lyrics to your Instagram stories. The feature allows you to not only add a song to your Story (you’ve been able to do that for a while), but also sing along with those lyrics, similar to what you might do with the app TikTok.

The internet has given us unprecedented access to everyone. Not only can we see what our exes are up to on multiple social networking platforms, but we are now (for better or worse) privy to the passing thoughts, candid photos, and incoherent ramblings of our favourite celebrities and personalities. We can also slide right into their DMs.